This book is the first attempt to think philosophically about the comic phenomenon in literature, art, and life. Working across a substantial collection of comic works author Agnes Heller makes seminal observations on the comic in the work of both classical and contemporary figures. Whether she's discussing Shakespeare, Kafka, Rabelais, or the paintings of Brueghel and Daumier Heller's Immortal Comedy makes a characteristic contribution to modern thought across the humanities.

A history of the comic has not yet been written. According to historians, the comic had very different, and sometimes even opposite causes, in relation to different ages and cultures. What provoked laughter in one civilization could be taken quite seriously in another. The comic has always had a particular function and its nature, its internal composition, has not been immutable. It could be kept within the limits of a single sphere that was assigned to it in particular (the comic, (...) as opposed to the tragic), but it could also be elevated to a conceptual vision of the world, and in this case, it embraced much more universal domains of human history. Nevertheless, nothing has been written on the history of the comic throughout all ages and encompassing all peoples. Serious studies concerning the place it occupies in the history of civilizations are, however, of great interest. (shrink)

Chapter 14. Andrea Timár engages with literary representations of the experience of perpetrators of dehumanization. Her chapter focuses on perpetrators of dehumanization who do not violate laws of their society (i.e., they are not criminals) but exemplify what Simona Forti, inspired by Hannah Arendt, calls “the normality of evil.” Through the parallel examples of Dezső Kosztolányi’s Anna Édes (1926) and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950), Timár first explores a possible clash between criminals and perpetrators of dehumanization, showing (...) class='Hi'>literature’s exceptional ability to reveal the gap between ethics and law. Second, she examines novels focalized through perpetrators and the difficult narrative empathy they provoke, arguing that only the critical reading of these novels can make one engage with the potential perpetrator in oneself. As case studies, Timár examines Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), which may potentially turn its reader into an accomplice in the process of dehumanization, and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), which puts on critical display the dehumanizing potentials of both aesthetic representation and sympathy as imaginative violence. Third, she reads Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones [Les Bienveillantes, 2006], which can make the reader question, through the polyphony of the voice of its protagonist, the notions of narrative voice and readerly empathy, only to reveal that the difficulty involved in empathizing with perpetrator characters lies not so much in the characters’ being perpetrators, but rather in their being literary characters. Eventually, Timár briefly touches upon the problem of the aesthetic and the comic via Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) to ask whether one can avoid some necessarily dehumanizing aspects of humor. (shrink)

Not all comics are art. What about the comics that are art? What sort of art are they? In particular, are comics a form of literature? For a variety of reasons it is tempting to think that at least some comics are literature. Nevertheless, many theorists reject the ‘comics as literature’ view. And although some reasons for resisting that view are misguided, I shall argue that there are other good reasons for being hesitant about treating comics as (...) a form of literature. This leaves us at an impasse with respect to the classification of comics. I suggest that the way out of the impasse is to recognize that comics are a hybrid art form. (shrink)

Comics have great potential to depict an almost infinite range of themes, questions and lives. But what about their ability to express and interpret philosophical concepts? How can we differentiate between the representation of theoretical concepts in and of themselves, and the impact of comics techniques on the legacy of philosophers, their lives and their thought? This book explores the historical and artistic value of representing lives through the medium of bande dessinée (BD), French-language comics. The text analyses three biographical (...) BDs dedicated to the lives of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus as well as a selection of print and online comics that extend the legacy of these philosophers and their historical movement. The work is the first to analyse biographical BD through the lens of Existentialism, offering a new theory of reading biographical comics. The research not only contributes a novel approach to comics but also an enhanced understanding of Existentialism and the Existentialists, including their enduring contemporary relevance. (shrink)

_The Art of Comics_ is the first-ever collection of essays published in English devoted to the philosophical topics raised by comics and graphic novels. In an area of growing philosophical interest, this volume constitutes a great leap forward in the development of this fast expanding field, and makes a powerful contribution to the philosophy of art. The first-ever anthology to address the philosophical issues raised by the art of comics Provides an extensive and thorough introduction to the field, and to (...) comics more generally Responds to the increasing philosophical interest in comic art Includes a preface by the renowned comics author Warren Ellis Many of the chapters are illustrated, and the book carries a stunning cover by the rising young comics star David Heatley. (shrink)

Graphic justice and the law of aesthetics have in very recent years successfully brought law, aesthetics and comics scholarship into the same space. The culture of copyright infringement within comics (including in the Marvel, DC, and Disney universes) has been extensively in the literature by scholars including Saval. How copyright law is portrayed within the graphic novels and comics themselves is the focus (and contribution of) this article. This article will explore several comics and graphic novels, as well as (...) included this author’s reflections of portraying copyright visually within zines for public dissemination. Throughout this article, the discourses of ghosts and spectres that are interwoven with copyright law and haunt the texts will be seen, as will the discourses of oppression and warfare that are involved for anyone seeking to make use of copyright works. As Gómez Romero and Dahlman note, comics offer “an alternative legal discourse” and we can see these alternative legal discourses through their aesthetic graphic form. This article will consider: the aesthetic portrayal of copyright law in A Gift for a Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats No. 6; as well as Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures. These comics and graphic novels have been chosen as they aesthetically portray copyright law and copyright infringement (referred to in some of the comics as “plagiarism”), and others aesthetically portray the public domain and fair use. In viewing these aesthetic manifestation of copyright law, the reader understands the limiting nature of copyright on creative freedoms, and that copyright law’s power is absolute. This article will explore the following: (i) copyright’s aesthetic portrayals and the impact of this; (ii) comics haunted by copyright law, considering A Gift for A Ghost and Josie and the Pussycats; (iii) comics about the necessity of the public domain and fair use, considering Bound by Law, Theft! A History of Music, and Pictures within Pictures; and (iv) self-reflections on portraying copyright aesthetically in publicly disseminated research zines. This article has not set out to determine that certain visual aesthetic portrayals are “correct” or “better”, but rather to explore how legal discourses and narratives about copyright law are circulated through the comics medium. These visual depictions hold considerable weight, and it is striking to see similar narratives used across a range of comics works, with different intended audiences. What is clear is that the visual depiction of copyright law enables a greater ability to convey the multiple copyright law discourses that can be felt at once, and also to highlight that some of these discourses are contradictory to one another. (shrink)

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different (...) sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times. (shrink)

We argue that the counterfactual representations of popular culture, like their religious cognates, are shaped by cognitive constraints that become visible when considered in aggregate. In particular, we argue that comic-book literature embodies core intuitions about sociality and its maintenance that are activated by the cognitive problem of living in large groups. This leads to four predictions: comic-book enforcers should be punitively prosocial, be quasi-omniscient, exhibit kin-signalling proxies and be minimally counterintuitive. We gauge these predictions against a large sample (...) of 19,877 characters that were derived from 72,611 comics using data scraping techniques. Our results corroborate the view that cognitive constraints exercise a selective effect on the transmission of popular culture. (shrink)

On the report model of appreciating fiction, one imagines learning about a fictional world through a report: reading or viewing someone’s account or listening to them tell their story. On the transparency model, one simply imagines the things that are fictional in the story, without imagining anything about how that information is acquired. It is argued that the transparency model is the default, in literature and cinema, but in comics, it is the report model that is the default.

Although fictional characters have long dominated the reception of literature, films, television programs, comics, and other media products, only recently have they begun to attract their due attention in literary and media theory. The book systematically surveys todays diverse and at times conflicting theoretical perspectives on fictional character, spanning research on topics such as the differences between fictional characters and real persons, the ontological status of characters, the strategies of their representation and characterization, the psychology of their reception, as (...) well as their specific forms and constellations in - and across - different media, from the book to the internet.". (shrink)

Using a lens of cultural industry approach, this study explores the rise and fall of the political entertainment with a focus on specific moments associated with the trajectory of Korean political entertainment in public setting. A historical overview of Korean political entertainment traces back to the 1930s when Mandam, a unique kind of political satiric talk became popular in 1930s. Mandam played a satiric role in influencing public opinion on political affairs, particularly led by the early generation of Mandam storytellers. (...) Their criticism centered on Japanese colonial rule, even though Mandam was limited in terms of freedom of speech during this period. Furthermore, this study highlights that the great popularity of Mandam was driven by business organizations for the commercial purpose. Mandam was placed at the core of intricate relationships among the related industries. In sum, the present study concludes that as distinctive form blending political information and entertainment, Mandam played a vital role in expressing individuals‟ political opinions under the communicative circumstances during the Japanese colonial period. (shrink)

This paper considers further evidence that five comic poets as opposed to three competed at the Lenaia and City Dionysia festivals in Athens during the Peloponnesian War. Aristophanes’ abuse of his comic rivals Phrynichos, Ameipsias and Lykis in the opening scene ofFrogs, produced at the Lenaia of 405, is interpreted as a response to his immediate competitors at the dramatic contest that year. A survey of the evidence elsewhere in comedy suggests that comic poets usually reserved such attacks on rival (...) poets for occasions when all were in direct competition at the same festival. Further analysis of Aristophanes’ competitive strategies also suggests these poets immediate participation in the festival and therefore that five poets competed at the Lenaia that year. (shrink)

In the article the mutual influence of folk theatre, Austrian Singspiel and Viennese opera in the genres of comic opera, operetta and drama performances involving music, singing and dancing is studied. The powerful influence of Italian and French opera schools, as well as the Italian Commedia Dell'arte led to the flourishing of music and theatre art in Austria: opera buffa (A. Salieri, Ch. W. Glück, J. Haydn, W. A. Mozart), fairy-tale comedies of F. Raimund and satirical dramas of Nestroy. Their (...) game-like nature finds its expression in musical turns, satirical songs and duets. Viennese dance operetta has absorbed the traditions of Viennese popular comedy and comic opera. Recitative, vocal music and folk dances were the key elements of operettas (J. Strauss junior, F. von Suppe, K. Millöcker, K. Zeller, F. Lehar). The music and the game in Austria are the results of theatralization of life: the life turns into something like art. Austrian culture, which is addressed directly to the human being and short of complex philosophical musings and speculative schemes, has genetically built-in playful, musical and theatrical basis, as well as German. Strongly-pronounced playful and musical source as an important national component of the culture, its code, determine its highly fictitious character (staginess) and integrity (both genre and intermediately), thereby maintain its special status in the European culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousai and the Challenges of Comic Translation:The Case of William Arrowsmith's Euripides AgonistesElizabeth ScharffenbergerThesmophoriazousai is conspicuously absent from the well-known and widely used series of Aristophanes translations that, under the editorial supervision of William Arrowsmith, was published originally by the University of Michigan Press and then taken up by New American Library. This is not to say, however, that a translation of the comedy was never composed for (...) this series. Arrowsmith took the task upon himself and began his translation of Thesmophoriazousai some time before 1960 when the Aristophanes series was at the height of its production; in later years, he revised his text at least once, and the evidence points to 1968-1973 as the principal period during which the translation was reworked. The cover page on the manuscript that he sent me in 1991 indicates that an introduction and notes (standard in this series) were to accompany the translation, but the package I received contained only the translated text, and I have no idea whether the notes and commentary were ever composed or finished. The text of the translation has a handful of typographical errors and minor inconsistencies in the directions on costuming and staging, which seem to mark the project as an arrested work in progress.The unpublished creation of a renowned classicist who was also a prolific and respected translator, Arrowsmith's Thesmophoriazousai — titled on the manuscript's cover page, Euripides Agonistes (Thesmophoriazousae)— provides an exciting venue for exploring the challenges involved in translating Aristophanes for contemporary English-speaking audiences. My purposes in this paper are thus twofold. I want to examine selected aspects of Arrowsmith's version of this comedy and also advance some general ideas about the challenges involved in translating the plays of Aristophanes and, for that matter, any comic work. My endeavor on both scores will be both preliminary and cursory; there is no way to do justice to every feature of this translation in a few pages or to [End Page 429] produce a complete theory of comic translation. But I hope that I can suggest a reasonably systematized foundation for analyzing the choices Arrowsmith made in his rendering of Thesmophoriazousai and, at the same time, present a set of criteria that might have broader use to people who rely on all kinds of comic translations.The "Frames" of Comic TranslationThere are very few works that treat, from either practical or theoretical perspectives, the translation of comic works and comic devices such as parodies and puns. These works include an essay on translating Ari-stophanes published in 1960 by Arrowsmith, titled "The Lively Conventions of Translation," as well as Douglass Parker's 1992-93 Arion essay in Arrowsmith's memory and André Lefevere's Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context. Their consensus is that translating comedy, especially Aristophanic comedy, poses formidable and unique challenges.1The most obvious challenge is the topicality of jokes and comic scenarios. According to Arrowsmith, "It is initially the hard facts of culture that most torment the translator of Greek comedy.... Tragedy... keeps a decent distance from common life, but comedy dumps into the translator's lap an intolerable profusion of things—odd bits of clothing, alien cuisine... unfamiliar currency, etc." (1960, 123). Thesmophoriazousai bears out this observation; it overflows with difficult "things" and "hard facts" to translate, beginning with the many props and elements of costume that come into play in the prologue with the appearance of Agathon and the dressing of the Kinsman, and including such crucial items as Mica's wineskin "baby." The problem of "translating" these objects is compounded by the challenges involved in making intelligible the comedy's preoccupation with Euripides and its many-layered engagement with Euripidean tragedy, which give rise to the parodies of Telephus, Palamedes, Helen, and Andromeda. These parodies go hand in hand with countless theatrical in-jokes and self-conscious references to local Athenian theatrical practices. Then there are the play's festal performance context (the Dionysia) and festal setting (the Thesmophoria), its allusions to local forensic and judicial procedures, and its caricatures of figures such as Agathon and Cleisthenes who, like Euripides, would have... (shrink)

This paper examines the Megg, Mogg and Owl stories of Simon Hanselmann, an Australian artist whose serialized comics both depict acts of contemporary roguery committed by a group of friends in an inner city sharehouse and test the generic limits of its own storytelling conventions, thereby becoming contemporary instances of “rogue texts.” The paper positions the adventures of Megg, a witch, Mogg, her familiar, Owl, their housemate, and associated characters including Booger and Werewolf Jones as contemporary variations of both the (...) Australian genre of grunge fiction and the broad international tradition of rogue literature. It shows how Megg, Mogg, Owl and their friends use the structure of the sharehouse to make their own rules, undertake illegal behaviour, and respond to the strictures of mainstream society, which alongside legal restrictions include normative restrictions on gender and behaviour. It shows the sharehouse as a response to their economic, as well as cultural and social conditions. The paper then shows how Megg and particularly Owl come up against the limitations of the permissiveness and apparent security of their “rogue” society, and respond by beginning to “go rogue” from the group. Meanwhile, the text itself, rather than advancing through time, goes over the same chronology and reinscribes it from new angles, becoming revisionist and re-creative, perhaps behaving roguishly against the affordances of episodic, vignette form. The paper argues that Simon Hanselmann’s Megg, Mogg and Owl comics can be understood as contemporary rogue texts, showing characters responding to social and generic limits and expressing them through a restless and innovative comics text. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 123.3 (2002) 513-516 [Access article in PDF] Deborah Tarn Steiner. Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xviii + 360 pp. 28 black-and-white figures. Cloth, $39.50. The production of sculpture in metal, stone, and other materials was a craft that virtually disappeared from the Greek world for several centuries after the end of the (...) Bronze Age. Small, solid cast bronze figurines reappeared in the ninth century B.C.E., but it was not until the middle seventh century that the first large-scale stone statues of women and men were created. From that point on, freestanding and architectural sculpture played a central role in Greek society and its artistic expression. While the stylistic evolution of Greek sculpture has been traced many times, in this provocative and ambitious book, Deborah Steiner sets out to examine, from a literary standpoint, "how archaic and classical Greek poets, philosophers, dramatists, and historians introduce statues as cognitive and hermeneutic devices in their texts" (xi). The investigation leads her to analyze what the statues "looked like, how they functioned," and "what they were credited with doing." The resulting book "aims to tell two stories, one about objects, the other about texts, and to show how each proves crucial to the other." The examination is somewhat lopsided, since the intellectual use of the visual material is given far greater emphasis than the statues themselves.The book is divided into five lengthy chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter, "Replacement and Replication," focuses on the physical resemblance of statues to people but not their inner natures. Chapter 2, "Inside and Out," examines, instead, the ways that a statue's exterior can relate more or less exactly to its inner truth. Chapter 3, "The Quick and the Dead," suggests that statues, by their very inertia, closely resemble the dead and therefore mediate in our imagination between the two states. Statues as erotic (or anti-erotic) art objects form the subject of chapter 4, "For Love of a Statue." The fifth and final chapter, "The Image in the Text," returns to the literary relation of sculpture to the production of memory: the similarity between victory odes and victors' statues, funerary epigrams and monuments, and the creation and regulation (on both the social and political levels) of honorary statuary and decrees. The retrospective epilogue is followed by twenty-eight black-and-white illustrations: Most of them depict well-known pieces of sculpture, but there are also several photographs of vase paintings and one of a drachma.In all the chapters, Steiner continually draws attention to the multivalent aspects of statues. The Greeks developed and applied a large and nuanced vocabulary to describe different types of image that embody differences only [End Page 513] poorly translated by our term, "statue": agalma, eidolon, eikon, kolossos, xoanon, and sema. Most of these have provoked extended discussion among modern scholars. The functions that statues played are even more diverse: they could serve as replacements for the absent or deceased individual, as votive offerings, as cult images, as commemorative monuments, as apotropaic devices, as protective symbols, as minatory agents, and occasionally as deadly entities (some statues could madden their viewer and even kill those who abused them or their creators by toppling over). They were also focusing devices that could evoke a wide range of emotional responses, from pity to lust. As exempla they served to instruct, and some could speak with their own voices, sometimes comically (e.g., the herms in Attic comedy) or poignantly through the words inscribed on their bases (e.g., the famous lines of Phrasikleia, the dead maiden who will never be a bride). The repeated use of the first person by funerary figures is particularly evocative. The inscriptions on other figures (like the very early Mantiklos Apollo statuette) make it clear that images could serve as bargaining chips with the gods for past services rendered or debts owed for the future.Other statues defy simple categorization—the Athena Parthenos, for example... (shrink)

I have naturally a [comique] and [privé ] style...I hate men base in deeds but wise in words.Although we have many examples of men, contemporary to Montaigne, who claim to write about their private lives, few of them satisfy our curiosity about the state of intimate life in the French Renaissance. For example, in Blaise de Monluc's Commentaires, his vision of recounting his inner self means, as he writes, detailing the "honor and reputation... [he] acquired... by force of arms."3 Similarly, (...) each subject in Théodore de Bèze's Les Vrais portraits des hommes illustres is painted in a more public light. Kings and military leaders reach the "summit of knowledge" and "glory," "surpassing all. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Language in the Confessions of AugustineDanuta ShanzerPhilip Burton. Language in the Confessions of Augustine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xii + 198 pp. Cloth, $72.Burton’s intriguing book explores language in the Confessions of Augustine. The topic is exemplified in action in Augustine’s own development from infans to puer loquens, to schoolboy, to young rhetoric student, to chattering Manichee, to professional rhetorician, Christian philosopher, and ultimately to biblical exegete (...) and preacher. Burton documents not only Augustine’s own development but also his abstract thoughts about language (development by physis vs. thesis; Latin vs. Greek; pagan vs. Christian), culture, speech (man’s, God’s, creation’s), silence, grammar, rhetoric, reading, prayer, and style (to name but a few). To study Augustine on language is to explore a crucial phase in the transition from the ancient pagan to the late antique, Christian world. Augustine’s views exercised tremendous influence in the medieval world.Burton takes an exemplary and essayistic British approach to the question rather than a systematic Teutonic one. The six chapters, three of which contain material published in other venues, explore “Sermo,” “Alternative Comedy,” “The [End Page 442] Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts,” “Talking Books,” “Biblical Idioms,” and “The Paralinguistic.” Despite its monographic cover, the book is best understood as a series of individual essays, since all can be read separately with no resultant loss of continuity or logic.After an often profound and wide-ranging introduction (“Sermo”), Burton bounces off those who view the Aeneid as a crucial subtext for the Confessions to discuss his new idea: the importance of comedy (by way of theatre in general). Three readings (Alypius in the marketplace, Monica abandoned, and Monica meribibula), which contain clearly comic lexical items as well as plausibly comic scenarios (in two cases), are supposed to invoke comic and mimic subtexts. While this reviewer is sympathetic to the approach, and has argued similarly for Apuleius (“Piscatum Opiparem... Praestinavi: Apuleius, Met. 1, 24–25,” RFIC 124[1996]:445–54) as well as for Augustine (“Avulsa a latere meo: Augustine’s Spare Rib—Augustine Confessions 6.15.25,” JRS 92[2002]:157–76 at 161) these particular interpretations, even supported as they are by sophisticated philological arguments, do not ring quite true or solve any problems in the passages. These constellations of apparently comic vocabulary (some of which is also late and biblical) may simply be an artifact of Augustine’s personal style, not the shadows of a genre or written source. Why would Augustine include a comic substrate in what Courcelle considered his inserted VAlypii? Is mime (41) really relevant, since Augustine never mentions it in the Confessions? Burton’s desire to see scenarios for moral contrast-imitation (58) seems implausible. Because we constantly confront the real coincidence of “life” vs. “literature” in the realistic genres, it is often hard to argue necessarily literary origins for a plausibly realistic motif. This fact makes the argument for “alternative comedy” in Augustine’s life-cursus somewhat unlikely.“The Vocabulary of the Liberal Arts” illustrates Augustine’s deep ambiguity about the artes through the language he uses of them. Burton uses the concept of substitutability of loan-words to explore alternative terms. In grammatica vs. litteratura and rhetorica vs. eloquentia, we see Greek terms used for distancing. Burton does some very interesting things with statistics of occurrence to show Augustine “going off” words and being defensive (for dialectica, see 76–77). He also shows us how a significant avoidance (arithmetica) enables linkage with the Bible (through numerus). The same applies to philosophia vs. sapientia (80–81). This chapter has much to say that is absolutely right and also important. Puzzling however is Burton’s concluding suggestion that Augustine varies his vocabulary for the artes to revalorize (86) and demystify them so they not appear a “knack or trade” (87). This seems unlikely, given the fate of his project on the disciplinae and the way he sneers at most of them in the Confessions.“Talking Books” develops ideas in Flores (1975) and Stock (1996) and contains much interesting material. The chapter takes us from the ancient querelle about the spoken vs. the written word, to books in the Bible... (shrink)

Visual narratives like comics involve a range of complex cognitive operations in order to be understood. The Parallel Interfacing Narrative‐Semantics (PINS) Model integrates an emerging literature showing that comprehension of wordless image sequences balances two representational levels of semantic and narrative structure. The neurocognitive mechanisms that guide these processes are argued to overlap with other domains, such as language and music.

One of the more compelling features of Denis Dutton’s The Art Instinct is its theoretical parsimony. Utilizing what essentially amounts to one explanatory principle—that of Darwinian selection—Dutton advances a theory of aesthetics that is at once general enough to account for cross-cultural variations in artistic production and sufficiently nuanced to promote insights into individual artworks. In doing this, Dutton’s work could not offer a greater contrast to some of the more vocal trends in contemporary aesthetic theory, where ponderous theorizing and (...) rebarbative jargons have violently opposed the idea—otherwise so modest—that aesthetic activities might draw on the evolved capacities of the human imagination. On .. (shrink)

The present volume comprises thirteen of the papers delivered at RICAN 5, which was held in Rethymnon, Crete, on May 25-26,2009. The theme of the volume, ' The Construction of the Real and the Ideal in the Ancient Novel, ' allows the contributors the freedom to use their skills to examine the real and the ideal either individually or in conjunction or in interaction. The papers offer a wide and rich range of perspectives: a political reading of prose fiction in (...) Late Period Egypt ; the presence of robbers and murderers in ideal fiction ; the interaction between illusion and reality in novelistic ekphrasis ; divine loves as real precedents for human loves ; comical elements in Heliodorus' Aethiopika ;myths as paradigms for the inexperienced lovers in the Greek novels ; moral ideas in the Odyssey and the Greek novels in relation to moralizing interpretations of Homer ; the reality of the basic plot of Callirhoe in the light of historical events and Aristotle's Poetics ; the interaction between fictionality and reality in Daphnis and Chloe ; entrapment and insu fficient understanding of reality in the Satyrica ; fantasy, physical and ideal landscapes in Apuleius' Metamorphoses ; bridging the gap between Photis and Isis in Apuleius ; the gendered aesthetics of the Greek novels viewed through the lens of the mimetic theory of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comic RomanceBenjamin La FargeIOn the surface, it would seem that nothing could be more different from comedy than romance. Comedy deflates, romance inflates. Comedy is realistic, romance fantastical. Comedy reduces, romance elevates. Comedy is democratic, romance heroic. Yet there are underlying similarities. Both involve a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses. In both, appearances are typically mistaken for reality, and both end happily. Above all, both are governed by (...) a structure of illogical logic that generates laughter in one and fantasy in the other.The generic differences between comedy and romance are crucial to a proper understanding of their functions. Comedy celebrates the renewal of life, the relation of man to woman and of man to man, in a spirit of tolerant acceptance, while romance celebrates a narcissistic dream of the self. If the former is best enjoyed in a crowded theater, the latter is usually enjoyed in solitude. Romance is a fiction of wish fulfillment. Since wishful thinking is generally understood as childish, romance is often regarded as a poor cousin among literary genres, haughtily dismissed by highbrows who associate it with the infantile pleasures of their childhood reading and with lowbrow fiction in general. This is precisely why so many sophisticated readers are reluctant to grant science fiction and other forms of fantasy any enduring literary value. In their view the pleasures of such works can not be taken seriously.Yet those childhood pleasures have a lasting appeal that lingers in the mind of every adult. There must be few grown readers who do not harbor a special fondness for the first heroes and heroines they encountered in their favorite childhood stories. Many of those heroes possess [End Page 18] some magical power; and when they place that power in the service of justice, especially the justice of revenge, their appeal is irresistible. I have seen grown men, armed and dressed for battle, avidly reading Superman comics. What stirred them, as it stirred many educated men and women in their childhood, was the spectacle of an omnipotent hero fighting to overcome the wrongs of this world.Even if our sentimental memory of these heroic figures is nothing more than nostalgia for irrecoverable pleasures, their initial impact may be seen as having a formative influence on a child's expectations, as many commentators have thought. In either case, they are all descended from a venerable tradition of literary figures. Superman himself is a direct descendant of Sherlock Holmes, who comes from a long line of English heroes going back to Robin Hood and Merlin, each of whom is involved in righting some injustice. Ultimately, all of them are descended from Odysseus, who reclaimed his rightful kingdom, after an absence of twenty years, by murdering his wife's suitors.Romance, like comedy, is a conflict between destructive and restorative impulses, and these impulses are embodied in the characters that inhabit this dream fiction.1 Like comic characters, the characters of romance evoke in us the same responses of wish and fear, and like comedy itself romance builds toward a catharsis of those two emotions. To achieve that catharsis, romance requires our "willing suspension of disbelief" (as Coleridge put it so memorably), which we have no difficulty in granting, provided only that the story is skillfully told. What we want from romance is the fulfillment of the wishes it arouses; what we get from their fulfillment is the pleasure of story-for-the-sake-of-story. It is this pleasure, in fact, that constitutes the basic, generic purpose of romance.The difference between the two genres, however, can be seen in the kinds of wish and fear they evoke in us, for unlike comedy the feelings of wish and fear evoked by romance are uncomplicated by ambivalence. We may wish to experience the destructive impulse vicariously through the protagonist, but only in order to see him triumph in the end. We are so entirely sympathetic to his enterprise that we cannot possibly wish for his destruction. If he is destroyed, as in the case of Tristan, the hero of the eponymous medieval romance, we are forced to recognize that the love potion he drank with Isolde was his... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Falling From the Sky: Trauma in Perec’s W and Caruth’s Unclaimed ExperienceEleanor Kaufman (bio)1 Fear of FallingIt is not surprising to find a link between trauma and falling in an entire strain of postwar literature. It is arguably the case that, in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, a new and more aerial form of spatial perception came into prominence, one in which (...) something or someone might reasonably be expected to fall out of the sky. Such a form of perception, vertical rather than horizontal in its orientation, is often experienced as an uneasiness directed at falling in both its physical and its metaphysical senses. That is, there is both a literal fear of falling from a height and a spiritual angst about falling, generally through no agency of one’s own, from one station in life to another.Within the postwar French tradition, 1 the conjunction of these two forms of falling is nowhere better articulated than in Georges Perec’s semi-autobiographical novel W or the Memory of Childhood. W alternates chapter by chapter between two different forms of writing: one a fantastical narrative about the faraway island of W, in which a robust society of athletes devote their lives to an Olympic ideal of sport, and which is organized by a system that first appears like a rational utopia but by the novel’s end devolves into a terrifying concentrationary universe; the other a non-narrative, truncated, and elliptical set of references to Perec’s own Jewish wartime childhood (Perec’s father died fighting for France in 1940; his mother died after being deported to Auschwitz in early 1943; in 1942, his mother placed the young Perec, aged six, on a Red Cross convoy headed toward the French Free Zone). In the autobiographical section of W, Perec gives several versions of his departure from his mother. In what follows are two of these versions, followed by Perec’s subsequent analysis of this memory.Of particular interest is the way that images of falling or suspension, here in the form of the parachute, punctuate this memory and take on their meaning precisely at the later [End Page 44] moment when Perec finds himself parachuting from the sky.The only surviving memory of my mother is the day she took me to the Gare de Lyon, which is where I left for Villard-de-Lans in a Red Cross convoy: though I have no broken bones, I wear my arm in a sling. My mother buys me a comic entitled Charlie and the Parachute: on the illustrated cover, the parachute’s rigging lines are no other than Charlie’s trouser braces.[26]My mother took me to the Gare de Lyon. I was six. She entrusted me to a Red Cross convoy leaving for Grenoble, in the free zone. She bought me a magazine, an issue of Charlie, with a cover showing Charlie Chaplin, with his walking stick, his hat, his shoes and his little mustache, doing a parachute jump. The parachute is attached to Charlie by his trouser braces.[54]A triple trait runs through this memory: parachute, sling, truss: it involves suspension, support, prosthesis almost. In order to be, you had to be propped. Sixteen years later, in 1958, when the haphazard fate of military service made me into a short-lived parachutist, I was able to read, at the very instant of jumping, one of the decoded texts of that memory: I was thrown into the void; all the threads were broken; I was falling, alone and without support. The parachute opened. The canopy unfurled, a fragile and firm suspense before the controlled descent.[55, translation modified]These two memories of Perec’s departure from his mother, as well as the third decoded reading dating from 1958, might be viewed together as the story of a trauma that, with characteristic belatedness, is only readable after the fact. Moreover, the motif of falling, in this instance figured by the recurrence of the parachute, provides the key to deciphering the memory of the trauma. The last—and lasting—memory of the mother is that of her buying Perec... (shrink)

What exactly are comics? Can they be art, literature, or even pornography? How should we understand the characters, stories, and genres that shape them? Thinking about comics raises a bewildering range of questions about representation, narrative, and value. Philosophy of Comics is an introduction to these philosophical questions. In exploring the history and variety of the comics medium, Sam Cowling and Wesley D. Cray chart a path through the emerging field of the philosophy of comics. Drawing from a diverse (...) range of forms and genres and informed by case studies of classic comics such as Watchmen, Tales from the Crypt, and Fun Home, Cowling and Cray explore ethical, aesthetic, and ontological puzzles, including: -/- - What does it take to create-or destroy-a fictional character like Superman? - Can all comics be adapted into films, or are some comics impossible to adapt? - Is there really a genre of “superhero comics”? - When are comics obscene, pornographic, and why does it matter? -/- At a time of rapidly growing interest in graphic storytelling, this is an ideal introduction to the philosophy of comics and some of its most central and puzzling questions. (shrink)

Our extant texts never give a fully comprehensive or representative impression of classical literature. Fragments are valuable because they tell—or hint at—a different story. They represent vestigial traces of a counterfactual alternative version of literary history, and they offer tantalizing glimpses of voices or varieties of human experience that were (accidentally or deliberately) excluded from the classical canon. To ‘think fragmentarily’ is to think beyond the canon and to question traditionally dominant modes of thought. This article uses a neglected (...) fragment of Damoxenus (fr. 3 PCG) as a case study for ‘fragmentary thinking’. This extraordinary fragment reveals that Damoxenus’ comedy dramatized a homosexual love story, in sharp contrast to the familiar heteronormative marriage plots of Menander and other Greek and Roman comic playwrights. Careful examination of a single fragment can prompt us to re-examine conventional scholarly narratives of sexuality in New Comedy. (shrink)

Introduction: Laughter as an expression of human nature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period: literary, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological reflections -- Judith Hagen. Laughter in Procopius's wars -- Livnat Holtzman. "Does God really laugh?": appropriate and inappropriate descriptions of God in Islamic traditionalist theology -- Daniel F. Pigg. Laughter in Beowulf: ambiguity, ambivalence, and group identity formation -- Mark Burde. The parodia sacra problem and medieval comic studies -- Olga V. Trokhimenko. Women's laughter and gender politics (...) in medieval conduct discourse -- Madelon Köhler-Busch. Pushing decorum: uneasy laughter in Heinrich von Dem Türlîn's Diu crône -- Connie L. Scarborough. Laughter and the comic in a religious text -- John Sewell. The son rebelled and so the father made man alone: ridicule and boundary maintenance in The Nizzahon vetus -- Birgit Wiedl. Laughing at the beast: the judensau: anti-Jewish propaganda and humor from the Middle Ages to the early modern period -- Fabian Alfie. Yes . . . but was it funny? Cecco Angiolieri, Rustico Filippi and Giovanni Boccaccio -- Nicolino Applauso. Curses and laughter in medieval Italian comic poetry -- Feargal Béarra. Tromdhámh guaire: a context for laughter and audience in early modern Ireland -- Jean E. Jost. Humorous transgression in the non-conformist fabliaux: a Bakhtinian analysis of three comic tales -- Gretchen Mieszkowski. Chaucerian comedy: Troilus and Criseyde -- Sarah Gordon. Laughing and eating in the fabliaux -- Christine Bousquet-Labouérie. Laughter and medieval stalls -- Scott L. Taylor. Esoteric humor and the incommensurability of laughter -- Jean N. Goodrich. The function of laughter in The second shepherds' play -- Albrecht Classen. Laughing in late-medieval verse and prose narratives -- Rosa Alvarez perez. The workings of desire: Panurge and the dogs -- Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Laughing out loud in the Heptaméron: a reassessment of Marguerite de Navarre's ambivalent humor -- Lia B. Ross. You had to be there: the elusive humor of the Sottie -- Kyle Diroberto. Sacred parody in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of wit -- Martha Moffitt Peacock. The comedy of the shrew: theorizing humor in early modern Netherlandish art -- Jessica Tvordi. The comic personas of Milton's Prolusion VI: negotiating masculine identity through self-directed humor -- John Alexander. Ridentum dicere verum (using laughter to speak the truth): laughter and the language of the early modern clown "pickelhering" in German literature of the late seventeenth century (1675-1700) -- Thomas Willard. Andreae's ludibrium: Menippean satire in The chymische hochzeit -- Diane Rudall. The comic power of illusion-allusion -- Allison P. Coudert. Laughing at credulity and superstition in the long eighteenth century. (shrink)

This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden (...) intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought. (shrink)

The likeness of sound between rhyming words is arbitrary, but words have meanings. Thus rhyme schemes carry an implicit meaning over against the explicit meaning of the lines in which they occur. The use of "death" and "breath" and other rhymes in Swinburne illustrates this duality, especially in his great sonnet addressed to Death. This prompts a discussion of the role of meter and rhyme in the physiology of dreams and memory, the human propensity to make rules, translations of Dante, (...) the comic rhymes of Noel Coward, and the real meaning of Seinfeld. (shrink)

In recent years, the problem of value has been drastically pushed away towards the periphery of the discipline of literary studies. More and more, this fact has come to be experienced as a source of frustration and misunderstandings.1 In this article, I would like to show the great extent to which a value-oriented approach is in fact inevitable. By the same token, however, I will also indicate the disturbing ambiguities that the consideration of the value-dimension may reveal. The example I (...) will use for my demonstration, the case of the French photographic novel , is fairly straightforward , but at the same time it betrays my slightly polemical intentions, since this genre is undoubtedly held in low esteem both within and without the domain of literary scholarship.It seems reasonable to assume that our twentieth century, with its turbulent successions of competing fashions and trends, has radically affected the concept of value, that is, the dialectical game of valorization and devalorization. The notion of value has of course become subject to “devaluations” on the content-level, as the mixtures and the instabilities of the criteria called on clearly lattest.2 In addition—and more important—value has been disobjectified, that is, snatched from the object of the judgment and located on the side of the judging subject. Jan Baetens teaches French at the Vlaamse Economische Hogeschool . He is the author of three books: Aux frontiers du récit: “Fable” de Robert Pinget comme “nouveau nouveau roman” ; Hergé écrivain: microlectures de Tintin ; and Les Mesures de l’excès: notes pour un traverse de “Eglogues” de Renaud Camus et al. . He is currently at work on the various aspects of grammatextuality in literature and the comics. (shrink)

Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health brings together scholars working in disability studies, mad studies, feminist theory, Indigenous studies, postcolonial theory, Jewish literature, queer studies, American studies, trauma studies, and comics to create an intersectional community of scholarship in literary disability studies of mental health. The collection contains essays on canonical authors and lesser known and sometimes forgotten writers, including Sylvia Plath, Louisa May Alcott, Hannah Weiner, Mary Jane Ward, Michelle Cliff, Lee Maracle, Joanne Greenberg, Ann Bannon, (...) Jerry Pinto, Persimmon Blackridge, and others. The volume addresses the under-representation of madness and psychiatric disability in the field of disability studies, which traditionally focuses on physical disability, and explores the controversies and the common ground among disability studies, anti-psychiatric discourses, mad studies, graphic medicine, and health/medical humanities. (shrink)

In contemporary histories of psychology, William Moulton Marston is remembered for helping develop the lie detector test. He is better remembered in the history of popular culture for creating the comic book superhero Wonder Woman. In his time, however, he contributed to psychological research in deception, basic emotions, abnormal psychology, sexuality, and consciousness. He was also a radical feminist with connections to women's rights movements. Marston's work is an instructive case for philosophers of science on the relation between science and (...) values. Although Marston's case provides further evidence of the role that feminist values can play in scientific work, it also poses challenges to philosophical accounts of value-laden science. Marston's work exemplifies standard views about feminist value-laden research in that his feminist values help him both to criticize the research of others and create novel psychological concepts and research techniques. His scientific work includes an account of the nature of psycho-emotional health that leads to normative conclusions for individual values and conduct and for society and culture, a direction of influence that is relatively under-theorized in the literature. To understand and evaluate Marston's work requires an approach that treats science and values as mutually influencing; it also requires that we understand the relationship between science advising and political advocacy in value-laden science. (shrink)

Arthur Danto numbers among the few contemporary philosophers whose writing is really a pleasure to read. Although rarely recognized, the source of that pleasure is Danto’s humor. His philosophical writing is consistently comic. Of course, the humor is obviously not of the knee-slapping variety. Yet it is pervasively playful.Danto will introduce a thought experiment and then explore it in several directions. Unlike many other contemporary philosophers, he is not stingy in laying out his examples. Whereas it is customary for most (...) other philosophers to sharpen their thought experiments like arrows in order to hit their target while carrying no wasted verbiage, Danto elaborates his, often.. (shrink)

Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant has recently begun to gain the concerted attention of critics, who have noted the play’s signature blend of low and high, of ephemeral, late Regency politics with the classic genres of Sophoclean tragedy, Aristophanic comedy, and mock epic. But Austin Warren’s famous and widely accepted definition of mock epic as “not mockery of the epic but elegantly affectionate homage, offered by a writer who finds [the serious epic] irrelevant to his age” does not describe Shelley’s earnest (...) goal of immediate political reform in authoring Swellfoot. Instead, the play evinces Shelley’s unique, conscious reconfiguration of four conventions characteristic of the high, classical epic: the “prosperous breeze”; the epic simile; katabasis or descent into the underworld; and divine intervention. I argue that Shelley’s comic adaptation of these epic conventions reflects his serious aim of helping effect reform through Swellfoot and embodies his absorption of the concept of Shakespeare’s history plays as an experimental hybrid of dramatic forms with epic subjects, gained during his earlier reading of A. W. Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Though the immediate suppression of Swellfoot prevented its relevance in its own historical moment, it comprises a singular hybrid of Aristophanic satire and Sophoclean tragedy with high epic conventions, while ironically also identifying Shelley as a proponent of the French neoclassical theory of the epic’s consciously didactic purpose propounded by Le Bossu. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth R. Seeskin THE COMEDY OF THE GODS IN THE ILIAD "... no animai but man ever laughs." Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium, 673a8-9 No reader of the Iliad can fail to be struck by the great extent to which social relations among the gods resemble those which obtain among men. Zeus, the oldest and strongest of the Olympian deities, rules as an absolute monarchor patriarch. The "council" meetings over (...) which he presides are not unlike those which occur on earth. Like Agamemnon, he must assert his authority from time to time; and, like any mortal king, he must deal with problems relating to jealousy, adultery, dishonesty, and revenge. To the extent that the gods differ from mortal heroes, those differences are similar to the ones which separate mortal heroes and commoners. The gods occupy the highest place on the scale of excellence, beauty, and social status, mortals with divine ancestry occupy the next position, and so on down the line. Although the above picture is accurate in many respects, there is something about it which is bound to leave one cold, for, unlike his mortal heroes, Homer's gods often appear as clowns. One need only recall scenes like Hephaestus' bumbling attempt to wait on the other immortals (1.584 ff.), Hera's seduction of Zeus (14.157 ff.), or the famous theomachy (21.385 ff.) to see that, ironically, humans frequendy are more dignified than the gods they are trying to please. It was scenes like these which caused Longinus, in his essay On the Sublime, to remark that Homer appears to have made his men gods and his gods men (sec. 9). Now any long story is bound to contain comic relief. But for many authors (Shakespeare, for instance), comic relief is supplied by those whose social status is lower than that of the main characters, e.g., grave diggers, nightwatchmen, country bumpkins, or pettythieves. As Aristotle argued in the Poetics (sec. 2 and 5), comedy is an imitation of men worse than the average. In Book 2 of the Iliad, Homer does use Thersites 295 296Philosophy and Literature for comic effect; yet this scene is noteworthy for being the only one in the book which supports Aristotle's contention. In practically every other case, comedy is supplied by characters better than the average: it is supplied by the gods. Moreover, in the few cases where mortal aristocrats are involved in comic situations (e.g., the rambling speeches of Nestor), the teasing tends to be extremely mild. Farce and slapstick are reserved almost exclusively for the inhabitants of Olympus. Plato, for one, was outraged by passages where the gods look ridiculous and wanted them excised from the text. Not surprisingly, there is a tradition of modern scholars who feel a similar sense of outrage. Walter Leaf, for example, maintained that the theomachy is poorly written and thus not the work of Homer.1 Gilbert Murray argued that several of the scenes in question are in bad taste, exemplify the spirit of Milesian skepticism, and, again, are not the work of Homer.2 Wilamowitz constructed an elaborate theory which claimed that these passages are the work of a later rhapsode who probably was associated with Archilochus.3 Finally, George Calhoun, who exposed the flaws of those just mentioned, concluded that such passages show the influence not of a later period of skepticism but of an earlier, less refined period and were composed merely to please Homer's audience.4 Since it is not my purpose to enter the long debate over the authorship and unity of the text, let me state the guiding assumptions of this essay dogmatically. First, the passages in question are not interpolated and serve important artistic functions. Second, for whatever reason Homer decided to include them, their presence raises profound moral and religious questions. From the outset, it is clear that any anthropomorphic conception of the gods will have to fail in one important respect. The gods are immortal, humans are not. Thus even the lowliest human can do something which no god can—risk his life. For all of their quarrels, deceptive schemes, and forays into the thick of the fighting, the gods are... (shrink)

One evening years ago I was watching a performance of the Chinese Magic Circus of Taiwan when it suddenly came to me that the fundamental characteristics of comedy were being acted out before my eyes. The discovery seems ironic in retrospect, as I did not find the performance very amusing, but the crude simplicity of the act illuminated the underlying dynamics of the genre. Two Taiwanese clowns came on stage dressed in the traditional white coverall and floppy hat that signify (...) a chef. One of them announced that he and his companion were Puerto Rican chefs, and they proceeded to set up a row of nine springy bamboo poles, each about seven feet high, each one stuck vertically into a firm base and separated from the. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable (...) - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)

carrington places race and racism at the center of his densely written analysis of science fiction, fantasy, utopia, and other forms of popular culture. He moves easily between a broad range of forms, which include memoirs, television series, comic books, novels, novelizations, fandom and fanzines, and short fiction and fiction circulated on the Internet. Popular culture helps us to construct notions of identity and race, and for carrington many constituent groups, notably fans, develop its key concepts and values.Speculative fiction is (...) for carrington a framework that links these various forms of popular culture. Here, SF is a genre different from literature, as it is situated closer to, and is more deeply... (shrink)

What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, Daniel Boyarin looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts he finds similarities, both in their combination of various genres and topics and in their dialogic structure. But Boyarin goes beyond these structural similarities, arguing also for a cultural relationship. In _Socrates and the Fat Rabbis_, Boyarin suggests that both the Platonic and the talmudic dialogues are not dialogic at all. Using Michael Bakhtin’s (...) notion of represented dialogue and real dialogism, Boyarin demonstrates, through multiple close readings, that the give-and-take in these texts is actually much closer to a monologue in spirit. At the same time, he shows that there is a dialogism in both texts on a deeper structural level between a voice of philosophical or religious dead seriousness and a voice from within that mocks that very high solemnity at the same time. Boyarin ultimately singles out Menippean satire as the most important genre through which to understand both the Talmud and Plato, emphasizing their seriocomic peculiarity. An innovative advancement in rabbinic studies, as well as a bold and controversial new way of reading Plato, _Socrates and the Fat Rabbis_ makes a major contribution to scholarship on thought and culture of the ancient Mediterranean. (shrink)

This paper presents a critical interpretive synthesis of research on the efficacy of comics in educating consumers on communicable diseases. Using this review methodology, the authors drew from empirical as well as non-empirical literature to develop a theoretical framework exploring the implications of comics’ combination of images and text to communicate this health promoting information. The authors examined selected works’ alignment with the four motivational components of Keller’s ARCS Model to evaluate research within the context of learner motivation. Findings (...) of this research indicate comics offer a useful method for providing consumer health education, particularly regarding topics that individuals may have difficulty in discussing openly. (shrink)

The literary stock of Achilles Tatius has been increasing steadily in value since 1964, when an article about his romanceLeucippe and Cleitophonin an encyclopedia of world literature began, ‘Das Werk weist alle Mängel seines Genres samt einigen zusätzlichen eigenen auf.’ To be sure,Leucippe and Cleitophonremains among the last and probably least read of the Greek romances; yet in the last decades critics have begun to draw attention to original and effective aspects of its composition. As is usually the case, (...) this revaluation has been accompanied not so much by the discovery of new virtues which had previously been neglected, but rather by the redescription as virtues of what had always counted as vices. Thus Cleitophon's lack of heroism can now be welcomed as comic realism, the implausibly melodramatic twists of the plot praised as selfconsciously theatrical ironies, and the baroque frigidity of the style counted as loony metaphysical wit or as BrechtianEntfremdung seffekt. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Noël Carroll THE PARADOX OFJUNK FICTION Perhaps on your way to some academic conference, if you had no papers to grade, you stopped in die airport gift shop for something to read on the plane. You saw racks of novels authored by die likes of Mary Higgins Clark, Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen King, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Sara Paretsky, Tom Clancy, and so on. (...) These are the kinds of novels that, when you lend them to friends, you don't care, unless you live in Bowling Green, Ohio, whether you ever get them back. They are mass, popular fictions. In another era, they would have been called pulp fictions. Following Thomas Roberts,1 I will call diem junk fictions, under which rubric I will also include things like Harlequin romances; sci-fi, horror, and mystery magazines; comic books; and broadcast narratives on either the radio or TV, as well as commercial movies. There are a number of interesting philosophical questions diat we may ask aboutjunk fiction. We could, for example, attempt to characterize its essential features. However, for the present, I will assume that the preceding examples are enough to provide you with a rough-andready notion of what I am calling junk fiction, and I will attempt to explore anotiier feature of the phenomenon, viz., what I call the paradox ofjunk fiction. Thejunk fictions that I have in mind are all narratives. Indeed, dieir story dimension is die most important thing about diem. Stephen King, for instance, makes diis point by saying that he is primarily a story teller rather than a writer. Junk fictions aspire to be page-turners—the blurb on the cover of Stillwatch by Mary Higgins Clark says that it is "designed to be read at breatiitaking speed"—and what motivates turning die page so quickly is our interest in what happens next. We do not dawdle Philosophy and Literature, © 1994, 18: 225-241 226Philosophy and Literature over Clark's diction as we might over Updike's nor do we savor die complexity of her sentence structure, as we do widi Virginia Woolfs. Radier, we read for story. Moreover, junk fictions are die sort of narratives that commentators are wont to call formulaic. That is, junk fictions generally belong to well-entrenched genres, which diemselves are typified by tiieir possession of an extremely limited repertoire of story-types. For example, as John Cawelti has pointed out, one such recurring Western narrative is diat of the recendy pacifist gunfighter, like Shane, who is forced by circumstances to take up his pistols again, widi altogedier devastating effect.2 Junk fictions tell diese generic stories again and again with minor variations. Sometimes diese variations may be quite clever and unexpected. Agatiia Christie was the master of this; she was able to use the conventions of the mystery genre in order to "hide" her murderers. In TheMurderofRogerAckroyd, she "secrets" the murderer in the personage of the narrator; in Ten Little Indians, die murderer is a "dead man"; while in Murder on the Orient Express, all the suspects did it. In each of these cases, Christie's brilliance hinges upon her playing (and preying) upon conventional expectations. Neverdieless, even diese surprising variations require a well-established background of narrative forms. That is, in order to appreciate diese variations, die reader must in some sense know die standard story already. And with junk fiction, it is generally fair to say that in some sense, the reader—or, at least, the reader who has read around in die genre before—knows in rough oudine how die story is likely to go. Readers and/or viewers of Jurassic Park surmised, once die dinosaur enclosures were described, diat in fairly short order die dinosaurs would trample them down and go on the rampage—after all we had already seen or read The Lost World, King Kong, and their progeny. So, junk fictions are formulaic. They rehearse certain narrative formats again and again. And, furthermore, in some very general sense, the audience already knows die story in question. But this knowledge on die part of die audience provokes a question, specifically, why if the reader, viewer or listener already... (shrink)